My Aryan princess | 6

Highest praise and lowest depths

A sense of pride and a new life give way to old ghosts

It was late, a few minutes before midnight, when Carol, her handler Steve Lair, and supervising special agent Pat Smith settled in around a boardroom table in a Las Colinas office tower.

Eight stories below, traffic lights traced John W. Carpenter Freeway.

“We couldn’t have done virtually any of this without you,” said Smith, the commander of Homeland Security Investigations’ Dallas gang unit. “And we’re dedicated to doing all we can do for you.”

Carol ducked her head, emotion building behind her eyes.

No one had ever praised her like that, at least no one like Smith, a man whose words carry weight in Washington.

A day earlier, Carol had escaped from James “Skitz” Sampsell by locking herself in a hotel bathroom. Federal agents say the decision saved her life.

Hours later, Skitz, a general in the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, had been arrested after selling a quarter-pound of meth to an FBI agent, a bust primarily set up by Carol.

The feds tucked her into a nondescript hotel room for safety. It was Jan. 22, 2013.

Carol knew this day would come, a day of reckoning, in the way people who live along the San Andreas fault know it will eventually rupture. But she was still unprepared for the jolt of it all.

Running from Skitz – the ABT’s highest-ranking officer outside prison – was an earthquake-like act of defiance, a moment when Carol’s loyalty to the Brotherhood gave way to her identity as a government spy.

In Las Colinas, Smith sat next to Carol, his 6-foot-4-inch frame folded into an office chair. He was flanked by an American flag and the Homeland Security Investigations crest.

“There’s a number of really bad people who are no longer on the street today because of you,” said Smith, his voice a duet of bass drum and Georgia banjo. “And I can’t thank you enough for that.”

Carol sobbed.

In all, Smith said, the feds had wrapped up 36 ABT members in an organized crime indictment, and 29 others faced charges ranging from arson to murder.

Carol’s work clinched cases against at least 13 gang members, including Skitz, one of the six-year investigation’s biggest prizes.

Smith said her intel would pay dividends for years.

But she would be in danger the rest of her life.

He offered to protect Carol by helping her disappear.

“You need to drop off the face of the planet,” he said, explaining how the government would move her to another city and pay six to nine months of living expenses.

“Where would you think of going?” Smith asked.

“Europe,” Carol said. “I thought of California, Seattle.”

“Have you given any thought to how much it would take to get on your feet and become self-sufficient?” he asked.

Carol shook her head.

“Well, have that conversation with yourself,” he said, “and come up with a reasonable number.”

Smith told Carol to cauterize every relationship in her life – with friends and family, banks and cellphone companies, church groups and faith-based groups and Facebook.

Especially with her parents.

Tears leaked down Carol’s face.

In an emergency, Smith said, agents would set up a conference call.

“That way you could be in Kalamazoo, Michigan, or f------ Dubai,” he said, “and they don’t need to know.”

Denver bound

Carol swallowed the first handful of pills before she pointed her dad’s pickup toward Denver.

Head swimming, hard rock on the radio, she pulled on a joint laced with synthetic marijuana – and floated.

Eight hundred miles stretched ahead of her, a long road into the unknown.

On a return trip to Denver, Carol recalls her attempt to start over, and how it went awry. (Nathan Hunsinger/Staff Photographer)

Denver hadn’t been her first choice for relocation, but the idea had grown on her.

Carol imagined a simple, healthy life. Clean air and pristine mountains, tips dipped in snow. A place to purge old habits and begin a new diet – of daily hikes to strengthen her lungs and legs; a government job with good benefits; maybe a ruggedly handsome man.

When sober, she knew none of it would happen.

But the drugs that induced paranoia also produced vivid dreams with elastic possibilities.

Carol left for Denver with less than $1,000 in her pocket – a fortune in her world – but far less than the feds had promised.

Agents originally said she’d be paid about $40,000. They also pledged about $25,000 in government support if her mother, father and sister moved from Collin County to Canada.

Smith, Lair and HSI Special Agent Steve VanGeem had pitched the idea at the family’s kitchen table a few weeks after Carol broke free from Skitz.

Smith did most of the talking.

Looking for your next great read?

If you like narrative storytelling like this, please consider supporting dallasnews.com by subscribing today.

He cast Carol as the heroine of a true crime story, one of courage and patriotism, and said the feds planned to hide her from the Brotherhood.

He said the family might be in danger, too.

“They tried to persuade us it was a real good time to get out of town,” said Ike Blevins. “They offered some money, it was all kind of vague, and I told them I’d be damned if I was going to let the ABT run us out of our house.”

In the end, none of it mattered. Federal money to pay for the moves dried up, forcing the local Homeland Security office to fund Carol’s relocation.

They scaled her support back to $1,500 a month.

The reversal left a bitter taste in Ike’s mouth. He knew his daughter couldn’t survive on that amount – and he’d have to make up the difference.

Besides, he was sure she’d never make it living alone.

Carol made his point about two hours into her drive to Denver.

She tracked north on U.S. Highway 287, through the tiny towns of Rhome and Alvord and Sunset.

Carol took them all, three and four at a time, washing them down with a Rockstar energy drink.

A Greyhound bus depot was Carol’s entry point to Denver. Earlier, she tried to drive herself to Colorado, but that attempt was cut short when she downed dozens of pills and was arrested on a DWI charge. (Nathan Hunsinger/Staff Photographer)

She has a vague recollection of a Texas Highway Patrol officer walking up to her window about 20 miles east of Wichita Falls.

She was charged with driving while intoxicated.

Ike paid her $750 bail and eventually bought her a bus ticket to Denver.

It was April 15, 2013, about three months since she’d walked away from the ABT.

Four men stood under a breezeway, clustered against the cold.

“What are the marijuana laws here?” she asked, a question within a question.

The drug is illegal, one man said, but the law isn’t enforced.

Carol bought two joints and five Percocets and gave the seller her cellphone number.

Soon after, she swallowed the pills and waved down a cab.

“People say I just wanted to get f----- up, and sure, that was probably part of it,” Carol said, years later. “But that wasn’t all of it. I was lonely. I wasn’t sure of myself. I didn’t have anybody, and I was a long way from home.”

For two years, federal agents had focused on Carol’s every word.

After she got to Denver, they rarely returned her calls.

Carol’s only tether was her dad, Ike.

He co-signed her lease and helped her rent furniture. He set her up with cable and sent Carol cash every time she “lost” her purse or “forgot” to pay the rent – in all, he spent about $1,000 a month.

“It was one thing after another,” Ike said. “I wound up supporting her mostly while she was up there.”

By paying the bills, Ike enabled her addiction.

She also got $1,500 in cash each month from agents. For one of the first times in her life, Carol didn’t need to hustle or hook to get high – until one Friday afternoon, when she said two homeless men stole her money.

By Monday morning, agents delivered another envelope stuffed with $100 bills and increased her draw to $2,000 a month.

Even so, she invented drug-seeking dramas to score pain pills.

Not long after she got to Denver, Carol arrived at Rose Medical Center in an ambulance.

Outside the apartment where she lived during her brief Denver stay, Carol recalled those turbulent days, including her brush with death by overdose. (Nathan Hunsinger/Staff Photographer)

She said she fell in her apartment, lost consciousness and needed pain medication.

When doctors refused, confronting her with a blood screen positive for opiates (oxycodone, heroin) and benzodiazepine (Xanax, Valium), Carol dissolved into tears.

“Pt. now insisting she is in FBI confidential informant program and they relocated her to Colo,” treatment notes read. “Her story breaks down quite a bit and is inconsistent. She has very labile emotional state and gets explosive outbursts of anger.”

After giving Carol 5 mg of Vicodin, a normal CT scan and referrals for mental health and indigent care, a nurse handed her a bus pass to get home.

Carol demanded to see a physician, declaring her pain intolerable.

An emergency room doctor wrote her a prescription for six Vicodin.

Like most junkies, Carol burned through cash.

She scored meth and smoked it with men she met on Craigslist. She stayed up days at a time and crashed in coma-like sleep, her circadian rhythms set by controlled substances.

He said he never really considered flying to Denver, and when he thinks back on that time, his mind retrieves a feeling of melancholy.

At the Denver hospital where she almost died, Carol talks about the close call. She arrived at the emergency room unconscious, with a mix of heroin, meth and tranquilizers in her system. (Nathan Hunsinger/Staff Photographer)

“If I’m honest about it,” he said, “she has caused us so much hell over the years – living with Carol is a living hell – I would have been very upset if she had died, but it would have been over. It would have been a bittersweet deal.”

Eventually, a high-pitched ring returned to Carol’s ears. When people spoke, the words sounded like the screech of a red-tailed hawk.

Her hearing improved each day, and feeling began to return to her legs.

Doctors said her sciatic nerve was damaged – probably from lying so long in an awkward position – but with physical therapy, Carol learned to scoot around on a walker.

After five days, and against doctors’ orders, Carol said, she checked herself out of the hospital.

A man she met online drove her home.

Coming home

Everyone had given Carol the same advice when she left Dallas: “Don’t come back.”

But after a few weeks alone in her apartment, she found a reason to move home. It was the Fourth of July.

“There were fireworks going off,” she said, “and it sounded like gunfire in my apartment.”

Carol called VanGeem, her new handler in Dallas, and told him she was returning to Texas.

She could hear the exasperation in his voice.

“I can’t stop you from coming home,” he said. “We can’t make you stay there.”

Ike said Carol looked skinny when she walked in the house – she’d lost 22 pounds in 12 weeks – and seemed as volatile as ever.

Soon after, he stood in the doorway of his daughter’s room.

Ike couldn’t make out much – the lump under the covers looked right – but she was just too still.

A former cop and volunteer fireman, he walked over and instinctively reached for her wrist. Nothing.

Carol’s mom, Sandra Blevins, woke up when she heard her husband on the phone with the 911 dispatcher.

By the time she got to Carol’s bedroom and flipped on the light, the tension in her husband’s voice and her daughter’s colorless face told her it was serious.

Time seemed to expand and contract.

It felt like forever until emergency lights flashed in the driveway, but once they did, everything happened at once – six EMTs pushed through the door, radios crackled, voices leapfrogged.

There were reports and pill bottles and towels soaked in vomit.

In the skip of a heartbeat, Carol turned a calm house into chaos.

In a nutshell, Sandra said, that’s life with a junkie.

“We’ve been through so much,” she said. “You just can’t get upset every time she does something.”

Cut off

By the time Ike walked into Medical Center of Plano, Carol was beginning to come around. She’d taken her month’s supply of anti-anxiety and pain medications – about 70 pills.

Carol continued to come apart in the next few weeks and months.

Police, court and medical records scattered around Texas document the self-destruction, like a debris field after a bomb goes off.

In the summer of 2013, she stormed out of the Medical City Dallas emergency room after doctors refused to write a prescription for pain pills, and according to a police report, later that night she punched Ike near a healing surgical scar on his back, knocking him to the kitchen floor.

She attempted suicide by drinking tire cleaner fluid, fought police arresting her for drug possession, and wobbled so badly in court a judge threw her in jail until she sobered up.

Government agents caught up with her at the Collin County Jail in McKinney, where she was serving a 30-day sentence for assaulting her dad.

Pat Smith, the big Homeland Security boss who had offered to protect Carol seven months before, said the feds were “deactivating” her from the confidential informant program.

Carol was no longer entitled to payment or protection from the ABT.

“It’s not personal,” Smith said. “We have rules, and you broke the rules.”

A payment stub documents Carol’s spy work for the federal government.

Flashing green light

But the feds weren’t finished with Carol.

A few weeks later, agents asked her to testify against Steven “Red” Goode, a former boyfriend she set up on drug possession charges in Kaufman County. In exchange, they’d see if they could get six months knocked off a one-year sentence she was facing for felony theft of shoes and jewelry from a department store in Odessa.

“The DA couldn’t promise me anything,” she said, “but it was made very clear to me they were going to get me out.”

Carol took the stand in an orange jail jumpsuit.

Voice quivering, she laid bare the last seven years of her life – from meeting “Crash,” an abusive boyfriend who introduced her to the Brotherhood, to working for Lair, her main handler while she was a confidential informant, to taking down Skitz, the ABT general who agents say issued a “green light,” an order to kill Carol.

Assistant District Attorney Phillip Williams asked her to assess the threat: “How far in the future do you fear that you’re in danger from the defendant and some of his …”

Carol interrupted the question.

“The rest of my life,” she said.

Goode was sentenced to 30 years. He’s eligible for parole in May.

Prosecutors made good on their word and released Carol after she served six months of a yearlong sentence.

If the Brotherhood had any doubt Carol had betrayed them, an appeal of Goode’s case in December 2014 erased it – details of her spy work are available online.

Carol’s green light, one agent said, is now a flashing green light.

“The bad thing for Carol is she crossed a guy who’s hellbent on finding the people who put him in prison,” he said. “Skitz is all about revenge, and we know he has a long reach.”